Sofia Samatar - A Stranger in Olondria

I wrote letter after letter to the Priest of the Stone, explaining my case and begging for mercy. I wrote to Tialon, asking her to come back. Ordu saw that my notes were delivered; he was an honest man; he told me frankly that no letter of mine would ever reach the mainland. Neither the priest nor his daughter answered my letters, but I went on writing them, for the act kept my mind from veering toward wild thoughts: a pencil pushed into a wrist. I paced in my chamber, barefoot and straggle-haired in my borrowed clothes, constructing logic, arguing with my own thin shadow.

Some nights the angel did not come, and I slept until Ordu opened the door and called me. After a time, only those mornings could make me weep. Having steeled myself to suffer, I had no defense against the simple light of day. I covered my face with my hands and sobbed.

All that could calm me then was my two-color copy of the Romance of the Valley . The flaking gilt on the spine, the woodblock illustrations. Felhami Fleeing the Fortress of Beal. The King Encounters a Lion. The creature’s mane deep rose and symmetrical as a wheel. I crawled down into the story, immersed myself in the looping and formal plot, the wintry battles and magical transformations, the witch Brodlian like a slug in the forest surrounded by her four white swine, and Felhami, slain, stretched out on a bed of rue. “ Long he rode, and darkness fell, and the moon was his companion .” The lines unchanged for eight hundred years, arrayed in their princely clarity.

Then one day a card fell out of the book, marked with a line in a hand I did not know. It said: “ Watch for us at midnight .”

A hiss woke me.

I sat up, hands clawed, every muscle taut, preparing to do battle with the ghost. But she was not there. Instead a shuttered lantern hung before me, emitting a single copper-colored ray.

I could just make out the fingers that held the light, and beyond them a shadow in a cloak.

The figure tossed something onto my mattress. “Put these on,” it whispered.

I felt what had fallen beside me: trousers, a tunic, a pair of woven slippers.

“Who are you?”

My visitor raised the light to show me his face. His eyes were shadowed, but his smile was pleasant enough. “A friend,” he said, his voice a breath. “A friend to you, and to the Goddess Avalei.”

I asked no more questions, but dressed in the dark as quickly as I could.

When I was ready I stood, and the stranger leaned close to my ear, bending slightly because, like most Olondrians, he was taller than I. “Follow me, and don’t talk until I tell you.”

“Should I bring my things?”

He gripped my shoulder briefly. “Not tonight.”

I followed him out. In the passage, tiny night lamps lined the wall, pale as fireflies. Ordu sat awake in his straight-backed chair. I stopped, but my companion took my arm and drew me onward, saying under his breath: “It’s all right.”

The nurse averted his eyes. It struck me that he had not answered when I asked him about angels, and I realized that he might have put the card with the strange handwriting into my book. The thought startled me, like a window opening in a dark house.

My companion led me through the common room, the dim beam of his lantern passing over the low ranks of deserted couches. We went down a corridor to the door, not the one that led to the garden but the other, the gateway to the Holy City. It was unlocked. We passed through like a wayward draft. My guide pulled the door behind us just so far that it appeared shut, but did not allow it to latch. Then we mounted a flight of lightless stairs and emerged onto a walkway where the night air met us, redolent with jasmine.

My companion threw back his hood. “Ah!”

He turned to me and grinned, opening his lantern so that the light swelled up between us. Then he held out his hand.

“Miros of Sinidre,” he said. “Disgraced nobleman, temporary valet, and general layabout.”

I took his hand. “Jevick of Tyom.”

“You’re a foreigner, aren’t you?” he said, lifting the lantern and peering at my face. “And a battered-looking one, too. What have they been doing to you in the Houses? You look hag-ridden.”

I glanced behind me. “I’ve been locked up. Shouldn’t we be moving?”

Miros shouted with laughter. “ Vai! ” he swore. “Thank you for reminding me of my duty. It’s easy to forget such things on a night like this. Right. Here’s the official message: Mailar, High Priestess of Avalei, greets you and requests your presence at her salon.”

I hardly knew what to make of him: his grin, his unkempt curls, the mixture of wariness and mischief in his manner. But his cheerfulness was as welcome to me as the breeze on that open walkway, and the Priestess of Avalei, I knew, was an enemy of the Priest of the Stone.

“I shall be pleased to attend,” I said.

He clapped me on the shoulder. “Well done. The formalities are over. This way—and don’t go to close to the edge. The railing, I warn you, was probably made in the days of worshiping milk, and it’s a nasty drop into the garden.”

We moved through the night palace. We walked across bridges, through halls where the painted statues looked startled in Miros’s light, as if surprised in acts of darkness. Sometimes we found sentries drowsing in stairwells, leaning on their spears, or pacing the battlements with a weary stride. None of them stopped us to ask about our business. With some of them Miros exchanged envelopes or tobacco, and once a small bottle of teiva ; but he seemed to receive as many gifts as he gave, so that the ritual looked less like bribery than like an arcane form of politeness. The night was cool and fresh, and on the terraces the wind came, lifting my hair, spreading the scent of nocturnal flowers. Between the towers where windows were lighted or lamps shone in the elevated gardens, bats veered fleet and precise in the light. We passed walls of whispering ivy, entered the peaked arch of a doorway. In the halls beyond, my sense of direction failed me. I knew only that we walked through one vast silence after another while the lamplight slid over frescoes and gilded floors.

At length we reached an indoor garden, its branches awash in moonlight. The only sound was the dripping of hidden water, and the ruddy glow of the lantern seemed indelicate, almost enough to wake the whorled flowers from their sleep. The waxy leaves of rhododendrons touched my hair in the scented gloom as we made our way down the tiles of the little path. At the end of this artificial jungle stood a door of dark wood flanked by tulip-shaped lamps, and Miros opened it for me with a bow.

“Here we are at last.”

I stepped past him into an antechamber. A lamp burned on a table just inside, guarded by a retainer in the last stages of senility whose thin, silvery hair hung over his shoulders. He looked at me doubtfully and then immediately lost interest and stood plucking at the loose rosettes on his jacket. Miros greeted him, clearly without expecting a response, left his lantern on the table, and hung up his cloak.

In the next room, night had been dispelled. The globes of the lamps diffused a light that artfully mimicked the beaming of the sun; they shone, glazed and bulbous, from the sweetly scented tangle of flowering vines coaxed to grow across the ceiling. This canopy of dark green life melted into the verdure that covered the walls, winding among the branches of trees growing in pots, trees that glittered with a subtle life which I soon realized was not life at all: we were entering a forest of colored glass. A bird’s wing flickered; the flowers around it tinkled. We crossed a bridge over a miniature canal that gleamed with carp. In the parlor beyond it a circle of figures sat or reclined on couches, enveloped in laughter, smoke, and the notes of a lute.